Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.04.2014, Page 12

12The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 4 — 2014
Hafnarhús
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Open 10-17
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www.artmuseum.is
Tel: (354) 590 1200

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One Ticket - Three Museums | Open daily
Continued...
While Bright Future is projected to lose
two of its six seats, polls favour the left-
wing Social Democratic Alliance, with
the latest numbers suggesting they’ll get
five seats, or two more than they currently
hold. The Social Dems’ leader, Dagur B.
Eggertsson, is also projected to become
Reykjavík’s next mayor. This would be
the second time Dagur sits in the mayoral
chair, having assumed that role for three
months in 2007/2008. With numbers as
they stand, the Social Democratic Alli-
ance and Bright Future are likely to hold
the most seats without serious challenge.
Meanwhile, the conservative Inde-
pendence Party has been scoring pro-
gressively worse in polls. Political veteran
and current mayor of Ísafjörður, Halldór
Halldórsson, leads his party, which is pro-
jected to secure four seats in the election,
down from the five it currently holds. The
centrist Progressive Party—the other half
of the national government’s coalition
with the Independence Party—is faring
no better, with current leader of the list
Óskar Bergsson looking at a steep uphill
battle to regain the single city council seat
his party lost in 2010.
Conversely, the newcomers in the Pi-
rate Party are riding high on their national
party’s parliamentary successes last year.
The Pirates are running on a freedom of
information platform and polls suggest
that their leader, Halldór Auðar Svansson,
is assured a seat, and that the party is very
likely to secure a second one.
The Left-Green Movement is holding
on to their one seat by the skin of their
teeth, with some close calls during inter-
nal elections as well: Sóley Tómasdóttir
beat out Líf Magneudóttir for the top seat
on their list by just one vote in the party’s
closed primary elections. Sóley is the only
female leading any of the municipal par-
ties. Her former party and fellow council
member Þorleifur Gunnlaugsson has
risen to the top of the newly-formed Dawn
Party’s list, although this social justice-
oriented party is trailing behind in the
polls and has some work to do if it wants
to get a council member elected.
Screaming Jumpers
A brief history of the lopapeysa
— Árni Hjörvar Árnason
Culture | The lopapeysa
It resembles the country’s rugged nature
and reminds us of the history of farming
and fishing when it provided its wearer
with a vital shield from the disastrous
weather one can encounter in the wild.
Furthermore it appeals greatly to the
disillusioned and globalised 21st Cen-
tury traveller. It’s as close as one can get
to the source without shovelling shit in
a sheepfold. It is purebred-organic-free
range-locally produced and whatnot and
therefore the perfect piece of clothing for
the buzzword conscious, artisan coffee
sipping twenty-something or other.
But, funnily enough, the Icelandic
woollen jumper is neither very old, nor is
its design particularly Icelandic.
Lawpih
Actually, the one thing that does make the
lopapeysa uniquely Icelandic is the mate-
rial used in its making. “Lopi,” as opposed
to the more common yarn, is simply wool
that hasn’t been spun, and whilst its de-
signs and patterns have constantly evolved
since lopapeysa’s inception, the material
hasn’t changed much. “If I was to describe
what a lopapeysa looks like,” says Soffía
Valdimarsdóttir, ethnologist and author
of a thesis called “Ull er Gull” (“Wool is
Gold”), “I’d say it’s a long-sleeve, straight
cut sweater with a circular pattern over the
shoulders. That is in no way an exhaustive
description, as they all vary in design, but
what does unify them all is the material.”
The tradition of knitting out of lopi is a
touch older than the actual lopapeysa, but
nobody seems to know exactly when peo-
ple started knitting unspun wool. “Folk
traditions never have a set beginning,
and besides, we’re talking about female
culture which was never particularly well
documented,” she says before giving an-
other interesting explanation for the lack
of documentation.
“People have been knitting spun wool
or yarn since the country was settled. It
was a massive part of each household’s
daily routine, but as the social structure
started to change and people started mov-
ing from farms to the fishing villages
women just didn t́ have the time to spin
their wool anymore” she says. “It would
have been considered shameful if people
heard you weren’t spinning your wool. It
would have been equivalent to not clean-
ing your house.”
The tradition of knitting unspun wool
comes from women’s survival instinct
and ingenuity when faced with rapidly
changing roles in the first couple of de-
cades of the 20th Century. Or put more
simply, Iceland’s cultural heritage was
born out of time constraints.
Auður And The Inca Empire
Turns out, lopapeysa’s origins are just as
hazy as the origins of its material lopi. “I
had always been under the impression
that this garment was a few hundred years
old, but it turned out I was wrong,” says
Guðný Gestsdóttir, managing director of
Gljúfrasteinn. Now a museum, Gljúfra-
steinn was the home of Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature winner Halldór Laxness and his
wife Auður Sveinsdóttir Laxness for the
best part of the 20th Century. I’m speak-
ing to Guðný in order to gain some clar-
ity on one of the more persistent theories
of lopapeysa’s origin, which attributes its
pattern’s design to the aforementioned
Auður.
Auður did in fact claim to be the origi-
nator of the patterned knitted sweater
in an interview with Vikan magazine in
1998, but the rather bold claim has been
widely disputed, and even Guðný says
she is fairly hesitant to confirm Auður’s
story. “What we do know though,” Guðný
says, “is that in 1947, Halldór brought her
a book on Inca culture when returning
from a trip to USA and the designs in that
book inspired Auður to knit a sweater with
a circular pattern over the shoulders.”
Auður’s Inca inspired sweater was
actually knitted out of coloured yarn, so
it certainly wasn’t the first lopapeysa,
but the story goes that it may have been
the first one to sport this circular pattern
we’ve come to associate with the lopap-
eysa. “Women’s creations weren’t particu-
larly visible at the time,” Guðný continues,
“and Auður may have assumed the role of
a representative as she was both a public
figure and very vocal about knitting tradi-
tions and designs, but despite her insis-
tence that hers was the first, I know there
were many women in the area doing simi-
lar things with patterns inspired by both
Swedish and Greenlandic traditions.”
“We’re actually about to delve a bit
further into this,” she says. “We’re team-
ing up with the Museum of Design and
Applied Arts and the Textile Museum to
research the lopapeysa’s origin.”
From Modern To Traditional
So, whether or not an individual can stake
a claim in having invented the humble
lopapeysa remains to be seen, but it is
clear that in the ‘50s and ‘60s enterprising
women all over the country were starting
to mould what would later become such
an inseparable part of Iceland’s cultural
tradition by experimenting with various
designs inspired by imported knitting
catalogues and magazines. But how did it
manage to become perceived as both “Ice-
landic” and “traditional” in such a short
space of time?
Soffía Valdimarsdóttir argues that tra-
dition can be old or new, but what makes
it stick is the fact that it always looks to the
past. “The Icelandic sheep is so deeply en-
grained into this nation’s history. It’s been
instrumental in keeping us alive since we
settled here,” she says. “It’s interlinked
with both of our historic industries, farm-
ing and fishing.”
And the sheep continues to keep us
alive. Turnover at Istex (the country’s
biggest wool manufacturer) has tripled
between 2007 and 2011 and the company
now manufactures more than twice the
amount of wool as it did seven years ago.
Most of that boom is attributed to grow-
ing tourism in Iceland, but Soffía says glo-
balisation can also be thanked. “Iceland-
ers have had to redefine their identity in
times of globalisation. The lopapeysa has
been handy in that respect as the wool re-
minds us of the local and national.”
Despite lopapeysa having originally
been a child of modernisation and foreign
influences on Icelandic fashion, it has
gone full circle and now provides a shelter
from globalisation and reminds us of his-
tory and tradition. Deceitful little garment
isn’t it?
“It would have been
considered shameful
if people heard you
weren’t spinning your
wool. It would have
been equivalent to not
cleaning your house.”
There are not many things that scream “cultural heritage” as loudly as the
humble Icelandic woollen sweater or “lopapeysa” as us natives refer to it. Hav-
ing one on is like wearing knitted Iceland.
Gljúfrasteinn, Halldór Laxness museum (Pictured: Auður, wearing a lopapeysa)
Social Democrats 28% (5 seats)
Bright Future 24.8% (4 seats)
Independence Party 24.4% (4 seats)
The Pirate Party 9.1% (1 seat)
Left-Green Movement 8.6% (1 seat)
Dawn 2.8% (0 seats)
The Progressive Party 2.0% (0 seats)
Others 0.3%
The poll was commissioned by daily
paper Morgunblaðið and carried out by
The University of Iceland’s Social Sci-
ence Research Institute from March
17 to 23. Of those polled, 60%, or 1,154
people, responded, 111 were not sure,
57 planned to cast a blank vote, 24 were
going to abstain from voting and 79 re-
fused to answer.
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The Latest Poll Numbers